James Elsdon-Baker, an activist with the NO2ID campaign, has a good commentary on the recent review of a poorly conceived, poorly communicated, and even more poorly implemented surveillance plan in Birmingham.

What U.S. readers will find particularly interesting are some of the statistics that he includes. Somewhat mind-boggling, to say the least.

Here’s a snippet from his article:

ANPR differs from CCTV in that the information captured by the cameras is processed and stored on a massive centralized database. Although these cameras in a Muslim area are currently not in use (as I write it’s unclear if they will be taken down), there will remain a national network of over 10,000 cameras. Together they have captured over 7,600,000,000 occasions on which the location of people’s vehicles have been automatically logged. This data is held for five years at the National ANPR Data Centre (NADC) that is operated by the National Police Improvement Agency and routinely shared with other countries.